The President Who Deserves the Credit for Reviving Presidential Debates May Have Lost Because of Them

Yanek Mieczkowski
is the author of Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for
Space and World Prestige (2013), Gerald Ford and the
Challenges of the 1970s (2005), and The Routledge Historical
Atlas of Presidential Elections (2001). He is currently a
visiting professor at the University of North Florida.

As Americans settle
down to watch the presidential candidates debate, they should
remember how this tradition made a comeback. Exactly forty years
ago, presidential debates reappeared as an American political
institution. In the summer of 1976, President Gerald Ford, after
fending off Ronald Reagan’s formidable challenge for the Republican
nomination, found himself trailing Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter by
thirty-three points in the polls. Boldly gambling to close that gap,
Ford challenged Carter to debate on national television. The ensuing
face-offs renewed the high-stakes political gamesmanship that John
Kennedy and Richard Nixon established in 1960 and marked the first
time an incumbent president took to the debate stage. Ever since,
debates have been a staple of presidential races.

The 1976 debates
also created one of the most inexplicable moments in campaign
history. In the second debate that fall, devoted to foreign policy,
Ford answered a question from panelist Max Frankel by declaring,
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never
will be under a Ford administration.”

The stunning remark
flew in the face of history and defied borders that any observer
could see on a map. Apparently, Ford refused to recognize Cold War
realities that had existed since the end of World War II, when Soviet
forces occupied much of Eastern Europe.

The statement also
contradicted Ford’s own past. In the war’s Pacific theater, he
had fought for the U.S. Navy, witnessing the conflict firsthand and
observing the wrenching changes it wrought. Intellectually, he had
no reason to make the mistake. He was one of the nation’s
best-educated presidents, a University of Michigan and Yale Law
School alumnus. As a quarter-century veteran of Congress, a vice
president, and president, he was steeped in diplomacy, and in 1975,
he ventured behind the Iron Curtain, visiting Poland, Romania, and
Yugoslavia to show solidarity with those Soviet satellites.

That trip provided
one explanation for the gaffe. In a 2003 interview with me, Ford
explained that he sensed the vibrant spirit of Eastern Europeans
there, even as they strained under the Soviet yoke. “My real
feeling,” he said, “was that the Polish people would never
accept, over the long haul, Soviet domination.”

Other explanations
account for Ford’s misstatement. He was answering a question about
the Helsinki Accords, which he considered the crowning diplomatic
achievement of his presidency. In 1975, Ford attended the Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe, where 35 nations signed an
agreement pledging to increase the movement of people and information
across borders. In his interview with me, Ford called the Helsinki
accords the “spark…that brought about the demise of the Soviet
Union.”

At the time,
though, critics charged that the accords ratified the Iron Curtain,
and Ford faced withering criticism that he had conceded too much to
the Soviets. Parrying such attacks for more than a year, Ford grew
defensive about the accords, and Frankel’s question only provoked
him. The reporter rattled off a laundry list of Soviet gains and
noted that “we virtually signed, in Helsinki, an agreement that the
Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.” Ford was eager to
rebut the charge, but that eagerness led him to overstate his case.

The Ford White
House expected Helsinki questions at the debate. Aides crafted
responses that the president could deploy, one of them denying “that
my policies accept Soviet domination over Eastern Europe….” As
Ford rehearsed for the debate, he took careful notes. He jotted down
the words “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” referring to Assistant
Secretary of State Helmut Sonnenfeldt’s argument that the U.S.S.R.
had an “organic union” with its satellites, which conservatives
and Americans of Eastern European descent stoutly rejected. After
noting this doctrine, Ford wrote, “There is none,” underlining
those words twice for emphasis.

Ford’s gaffe
might have boiled down to a trick that his memory played on him,
compounded by the slippery slope of semantics. Always a
conscientious student, he likely pored over his handwritten notes as
he prepared for the debate, and he might have remembered that key
phrase—“There is none”—but embellished it incorrectly by
adding the words about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. If he
had articulated the sentence his aides had prepared, saying that the
“Ford administration does not accept” or “does not concede”
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe—as he did in clarifying his
remarks to Frankel—his initial response would have passed muster,
and debate history would have been kinder to him.

As it was, Ford’s
answer generated a media firestorm that sucked oxygen from his
campaign. On election day, he lost by two percentage points. He had
staged a remarkable comeback; his strategy of using televised debates
to overtake Carter almost worked. But his words became one of those
defining debate mistakes—like Nixon’s sweaty, haggard appearance
in 1960 or Al Gore’s patronizing sighs in 2000—that contributed
to defeat.

Despite the
misstep, though, Ford’s legacy from the 1976 debates has endured.
After Watergate’s traumas and the secrecy shrouding the Nixon
administration, Ford touted his White House’s “open, accessible”
nature. Bringing debates back became one way to open a window on
political campaigns, allowing Americans to view their candidates in
an unscripted setting. That process has become a vital part of U.S.
politics, and these contests provide moments that define campaigns
and sometimes decide elections. Forty years later, let the debates
begin again.